On Wednesday, October 5, 2016 at 4:50:51 PM UTC-4, wrote:
In the early 1970s, my father and I loaded our damaged 201 Libelle into a tall, straight-topped, corrugated-aluminum-and-steel-tube trailer meant for a 16.5M Diamant. Almost unbelievably given the weight of the Diamant wing, it was set up to load wingtips first from the rear. So that's how we loaded the Libelle wings: i.e., spars aft. The fuselage we just rolled into the trailer and tied it down as best we could using the tail tiedown bracket that was in place.

As you can imagine with our short-span bird sitting well aft of where the Diamant would be, the trailer was somewhat tail heavy. Off we went in the family Chevy station wagon (read: heavy, full-size American car from that era) from Cincinnati to the Gehrleins' repair facility in Erie, PA, a 350 mile journey that should have taken about 5 hours.

I have long since suppressed most memories of that terrifying trip but not the lessons of that masters-level, crash course (no pun intended, fortunately) in trailer control. Everything I know about keeping uncooperative trailers in line I learned that day. I almost had to pry my fingers off the steering wheel when we arrived.

I learned how to slow going uphill so I could avoid slowing (not good) or braking (really bad!), and even accelerate slightly if needed on the way down the hill. How to accelerate slightly when being passed by a large truck.. Or anything larger than a motorcycle, for that matter. How to watch in the mirror to make certain there were no large trucks overtaking as we reached the top of a hill.

How never to touch the brakes going around a curve. How to hit the throttle to straighten out an incipient tail wag, including when going downhill being passed by a large truck (see "how to slow going uphill", above).

I don't know why we didn't just stop and move things forward, or pile a bunch of stuff in the front of the trailer to get some tongue load. I guess we didn't know any better. Or assumed it was some fundamental flaw in trailer stability. The empty trailer towed fine on the way home, unsurprisingly. If I recall correctly, the subsequent owner of that glider moved the axle back to get some more weight on the tongue even with the heavier, longer-span Diamant in the box, and it towed fine.

To this day, almost 45 years later, I'm still wary of the little twitch in the steering wheel that signals the trailer is moving around and could get squirrelly.

Chip Bearden

My PIK trailer was a bit wiggly when pulling with my little Triumph TR7. It did get rolled when we got run off the road by a truck and ended up with an uncontrollable divergent oscillation.
The glider did not get hurt and flew in my first Nationals 2 days later(another story).
When repairing the trailer I replaced the front frame members with one size larger tubing and extended the tongue area about 8 inches. It was like a different trailer and never wiggled again. Tongue weight was almost exactly the same so my theory was that the longer arm from the tow ball to the oscillation dampers(wheels) was enough to entirely change the dynamics.
FWIW
UH